Dune, in all its volumes and adaptations, is a work of science fiction. Here are some things that happen in Dune: prophecy, folding space using the mind, telepathic control of others, and telepathically determining the truth. Does that sound like science fiction? The reason Frank Herbert landed on wild mind powers was his reasoning that at some point AI would prove dangerous. At that point, perhaps, humanity would ban AI. A few thousand years later, when people are forced to turn to the human mind for complex calculations, we may end up with minds who are able to fold space, and therefore predict the future. Is this science fiction? If so, is it hard science fiction or soft science fiction? What do those terms mean anyway? Here’s more from Gary Westlake at Depau University:
As a way to begin a discussion of hard SF, it is surely useful to examine when and how the term emerged.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, there were several tentative efforts to establish a label for such a category. In 1955, C.S. Lewis called Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, H.G. Wells’s “The Land Ironclads,” and Arthur C. Clarke’s Prelude to Space “Engineers’ Stories”…. Gregory Benford recalled a conversation with Poul Anderson in the early 1960s when they employed the phrase “Campbellian science fiction” (personal communication), while Harlan Ellison used the similar “Campbellesque science fiction,” as well as “the Campbell heavy-science story” and “the Campbell dull-science novel,” to condemn Frank Herbert’s The Dragon in the Sea in 1968…. In the blurb to Clarke’s “The Wind from the Sun” [then called “Sunjammer”],1 Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr observed, “Just as the mystery field has a sub-genre called ‘police procedural fiction’…a type of story so integrally concerned with how the future will work…might be called ‘procedural science fiction’—and Arthur C. Clarke, with tales like PRELUDE TO SPACE and A FALL OF MOONDUST, has shown that he is the master of the form”….